For a while no one spoke Kael's name. It hung in the air like a spark that would set the whole hour off if breathed on.
Nhilly said it first. "We move," he told the captains, voice flat from being scraped clean. "We leave him."
Celeste's eyes went wide with a refusal so pure it looked like youth. "No."
"We leave him," he repeated, and the words cracked around the edges. "He bought this."
"Then spend it on going back," she snapped, stepping into his chest as if she could physically change his answer. "I can pull the barrier off and—"
"You can't pull him out of the earth." His jaw shook once and he took it between teeth. "If I ask you to try, you die where he did. That is arithmetic, not courage."
"Don't you dare—" Her voice broke. He caught her shoulders without ceremony and without rank. For one heartbeat he put his forehead against hers, the way you hold two pieces of glass together and hope the seam will take.
"It's what he would want," he said quietly, and hated the line because it was both true and something people say when they are going to do something unforgivable. "He made me promise not to improvise without him." A breath that wasn't a laugh. "So we do the plan. We go."
Her hands climbed his wrists as if to climb him and then fell. "I hate your plans."
"I know." He hugged her once, quick, desperate, clumsy, and let go before the hour could see it and make it weak.
They set their eyes on the west: a long, paled wall shouldering the horizon the cliff that kept Selloris, the Wyre capital, in the lee of the Wastes. One hundred fifty-nine meters by Kael's old map and Nhilly's bad guesswork—shorter than the Hound and taller than hope. Beyond it lay an open stretch of hardpan and road, the only honest line to the city. If they could get over, they could run without the sand sucking at ankles or the glass knives the Wastes grew underfoot.
Heads turned, theirs and the watching Wyre both. The cliff was a black line on the horizon, a broken molar of the world. A hundred and fifty-nine meters, smaller than the Hound and still too big for men.
"We won't make the face in time," a Lydia captain said. His voice sounded like yesterday.
"We won't," Nhilly agreed. "So we cheat."
He lifted a hand. The Shroud clung like old smoke. "I'll carry what I can with Float. I can do pairs, maybe threes if they tie themselves into one problem. Celeste puts invulnerability on the ones who jump; one at a time, breathe on fours, then off again. You land on your backsides, you roll, you curse, you live. No songs. No speeches. Flags only. Runners in pairs. White for litters. We all pass work forward."
Wyre officers glanced at one another and then at us, shame and pride arguing in their mouths. One of them, older, with a scar like a chalk line under his eye, nodded. "We do not fight you," he said. "We fight that."
"That," Celeste echoed, meaning the ground as much as the beast.
It wasn't easy convincing men to be carried like sacks and thrown like stones. Men want to prove they can climb what their hands can't hold. Nhilly put the mask back on—the perfect actor—and sold them something they could afford.
"You want to be brave?" he called, voice clear as a bell rung over water. "Then be first to be carried. Be first to be called a coward by the ones who would rather die on the wrong side of a rock. Be the fool who lives. I won't stop until you are all over. All of you."
He didn't tell them that he could feel tremors already sneaking up through his ankles, the sand whispering a promise in a language with too many teeth. He didn't tell them how far he could carry on an empty tank, how Float turned mean when Overload was still written in the muscles. He smiled badly and made it look like intent.
"Children first," Celeste said, law, not suggestion.
"Children first," Nhilly repeated, and that was how the order became true.
—
They moved fast because terror is an excellent quartermaster. Wyre and Lydia lined in a long coil that aimed at the foot of the cliff. Flags woke and found their old honesty. White opened lanes for litters. The still-living learned to look for small hands in the dust.
The first child Nhilly lifted weighed nothing and everything. He wrapped a belt around the girl and the boy she clung to, made the buckle into a grip, and rose. The Shroud whined at the added work; he told it to sing later and hauled. Thirty lengths. Fifty. A hundred. He set them down on a ledge a tenth of the way up—flat enough for a nap, if the world had allowed napping—and went back.
"Again," he said. "Next two."
They brought him a knot of four—too many. He shook his head, split them, promised with his mouth that he would return with his hands. He did.
On the seventh lift he found the boy from Marrow.
The boy looked taller; fear does that to a spine. The dirt on his cheeks was harder to read because the wind had written new lines over the old ones. He stood not in front of the line and not at the back, the way boys stand when they've learned that both ends get you killed sooner.
"You," Nhilly said softly, recognizing the angle of a chin he had spared once in a village painted in blood. "Marrow." The boy's mouth stayed stubborn as stone.
"You said to stay down I ran." he answered, like accusing a man of making the world crooked.
"You did," Nhilly said. "And you're still here, which is smarter than most of us." He crouched so their eyes were level.
"Name?" The boy hesitated long enough to be brave about it. "Jiren."
"Jiren." Nhilly smiled with almost none of his teeth. "You remind me of me before I got boring."
"I hate you," Jiren said, and then, ugly and honest, "but you really are a hero."
"Good enough," Nhilly said. "We'll argue about the rest later."
Nhilly tied a strap around Jiren and a little girl with marble eyes, knotting them into one problem. "Keep your hands busy," he said. "Choose one person to follow and don't change your mind when you get scared. Breathe on fours. Don't try to be brave—be useful."
Jiren considered it like a trade, then gave the smallest nod and held the girl tighter.
"You're going to hate this," Nhilly warned. "Celeste."
Celeste's hands flicked and the barrier jumped from her to the boy; a green outline settled on Jiren as if a patient aunt were pinning a ribbon he did not deserve. His eyes went round at the pressure.
"You can," Nhilly said, and pushed him.
Jiren fell in a straight, offended line. The cliff's face rushed, then reared; the ground arrived like a bad decision. The barrier took the insult and made it uninteresting. He hit, bounced, rolled exactly as he was too furious to be taught to do, then scrambled up, already grabbing others by the elbows and barking them toward the water line with a competence that would've been funny on another day.
"Again," Celeste said, voice crisp as a snapped twig.
They worked.
Nhilly ferried—two at a time when he dared, one when the weight felt like it would tear him out of the sky. Children, then the hurt, then the ones whose eyes were glass because loss had polished them. Wyre and Lydia without colour or badge; the only uniform was dust. He carried a Wyre officer whose mouth had been red with orders in the morning and a Lydia girl who had taken a tooth through the calf and was trying not to be brave about it. He carried a man who kept saying "thank you" as if it were a prayer and a woman who said nothing and looked at the cliff as if it were a bill come due.
Celeste turned law into a conveyor. Each jump was a problem to solve: too light, loosen the grip; too heavy, harden the skin; one has to breathe, pulse on the fours; this one faints on the fall, roll them for them. Her Star shaped itself to shin and skull, ribs and wrists. The green outline became a procession of saints and sinners who did not consent to the title and lived anyway.
"Keep them rolling," Kael would have said.
Nhilly said it for him. "Roll! Move! Make room! Next!"
He did not count the trips. Someone else did, because someone always does. Forty. Sixty. A hundred. Sweat made tracks through the dust on his face. His breath sawed. Twice he had to stop on the ledge and sit down because the world had tilted and continued moving without him. Twice he stood up and lied to his own blood about what it was for.
He carried a Wyre boy whose bandage was too clean to be recent. "My sister," the boy said in the small, too-polite voice people use when they think gods are present. "She's—"
"You'll meet her on the other side," Nhilly lied with perfect form, and he held the boy tighter for the distance it would have to travel to become true.
He carried a Lydia sergeant whose hands wouldn't let go of a broken standard. "Leave it," Nhilly told him.
"It's my job," the man said.
"Your job is standing up on the other side," Nhilly said, and peeled the fingers off with a tenderness that spared no pride.
He carried a woman who spit in his face because he was Nhilly and then didn't let go of his collar until her boots touched ground. He carried a man who said he had never flown before and laughed all the way down and then wept because he had laughed.
One hour. Twelve minutes. The sun nicked across the edge of the cliff face like a file over a blade. The open stretch beyond was filling with a messy, breathing geometry: triage tents made out of white flags; a line of water; a place where someone with a captain's voice was sorting those who could still march from those who would be dragged. Jiren had found a high crate to stand on and was pointing at people with a little king's authority, sending them left and right with a ferocity that would have been funny on another day.
Lydia and Wyre learned together without being told to: how to catch jumpers on the bounce without breaking ribs; how to shout "clear!" before the next saint fell; how to lay bodies in the shade of a bluff instead of under a banner. Someone started to say "for Lydia" and someone else said "for living," and everyone liked the second better because it used fewer letters and ate less breath.
Nhilly kept moving until the world narrowed to a tunnel with one idea in it: up, down, touch, go. Once he almost dropped a child because his hand forgot it was a hand and thought it was a blade. He swore, gently, at himself like a teacher who loved a poor student.
Twice the rope lanes snarled and fights started, which was to say grief found a weapon; twice he landed in the middle with enough force to shame them into order. "I'll carry the ones who fight last," he said, voice gone quiet and dangerous, and it was such a good lie it worked.
Celeste refused water until she couldn't refuse it. She drank and then threw the cup aside so she could use her hands; the barrier was a constant hum that ate the edges off her fingers. More than once she caught a jumper wrong and watched a knee bend too far and fixed it with a different kind of mercy. "Breathe on fours," she told them, a thousand times, until the phrase lost meaning and kept its usefulness.
"Nhilly." A runner's voice, cracking.
"Later," he said, because everything that wasn't the next pair of hands was later.
"Nhilly," the same voice said, closer, braver. "The ground—"
He felt it before he heard it, the way a man feels a storm in teeth that have been broken and badly set. A tremor ran up the cliff like an animal testing a fence.
Thoom.
He landed on the ledge with two at once—too heavy, too ambitious—and something in his shoulder sang a note that promised a bad afternoon. He set them, shoved, turned.
The sand at the base of the cliff breathed in.
"Move!" he shouted down, unnecessary as the human body's first flinch. "Clear the foot! No one under the face! Flags plain—get away from the wall!"
Celeste's head snapped toward the east. Her hands opened without being told; the barrier snapped back to herself for an instant and then out to a child who had jumped off without her permission. She caught him with green law and made physics apologize.
Up on the ledge, Nhilly put his palm to the rock as if a touch could talk sense into geology. The cliff thrummed under his hand like a throat about to speak. He looked across the face and couldn't count the number of people still queued on the wrong side of life.
He lifted hard for the crest.
He reached the top and set down beside Celeste, where a short line of men already knelt in readiness for her hands—waiting to be skinned green and hurled down the safe side. Behind them, down in the valley, the bulk of those still waiting stretched like a living seam at the cliff's base. He had left them—had to leave them—below.
"On me," Celeste told the next man, already shaping the barrier to his ribs.
Nhilly looked once over the edge—at the long coil of lives he had not yet touched—then forced himself back, standing with Celeste and the few on the crest who were queued for the jump.
The ground took a slow, luxurious breath in.
The valley's heartbeat returned in a new key.
Thoom.
The hour drew breath to speak again.